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Kent and Medway Care Record

Information about how your health and social care is being brought together in one place, in the Kent and Medway Care Record (KMCR). This means that both health and social care providers can easily access vital information about you from other care providers. They will be able to see what care you receive and anything else such as medical conditions and medications.

It will help make sure you receive the best possible care for your circumstances.

By bringing health and social care information together we can improve the safety, accuracy, speed and quality of care provided. You won’t have to repeat your medical or care history to each professional you deal with.

The record can only be accessed by the professionals who are authorised to and involved in your care.

How the KMCR will improve care

  • Improve the patient or care recipient’s experience – less need to repeat information to multiple professionals

  • Improve times and accuracy of clinical and social care decision making

  • Improve safeguarding of vulnerable children and adults

  • Less time spent identifying and contacting other professionals involved in an individual’s care

Who currently has access to my information?

Your records are kept by individual organisations involved in your care. For example, your GP will have a record and if you attend hospital, they create a separate record. If you use adult and children’s services in local authorities, they will also create another record. These are unlikely to be shared, so they can be inaccurate or incomplete.

The Kent and Medway Care record will bring these records together in one place and provide a fuller picture of your health and social care needs for the professionals that require it. This is a legal requirement under the Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015.

Examples of the benefits of shared care records

There will be less time spent identifying and contacting other professionals involved in someone’s care

Feedback from second year junior doctors in Cheshire using the shared care record showed they saved an average of 17 hours per month (48 minutes per day) chasing GPs for medication records.

Expanding this across other professionals, showed an average time saving of 71.3 minutes per day (around 25 hours per month). The biggest impact was for social workers, who can spend hours calling GPs and hospitals for their patient’s medication details.

A survey of 110 social care workers in Nottinghamshire calculated they would each save an average of over 95 hours a year seeking information from health organisations – equivalent to around 3 weeks of each social worker’s time.

A better experience for people who get social care or support

There are a number of ways KMCR can ensure this, including:

  • carers have access to a list of prescribed medicines. They can make sure correct doses are given at the right times, without having to rely on the person they’re caring for to remember what they should have
  • social care workers can see when someone has been admitted to hospital and why. They can make sure the person is safe and rearrange calls and visits for when they are needed
  • occupational therapists can instantly get information for their assessments, without having to write to GPs and wait for the information
  • if duty workers receive conflicting information about someone they support, they can see the correct information in the KMCR. They do not need to call other organisations trying to check.

Health and social care professionals who will be able to access health records

Personal data will only be shared between the health and social care organisations that are signed up to the KMCR Joint Controllers Agreement.

These include:

  • primary care (for example your GP practice)
  • community services
  • mental health services
  • local authority social care departments
  • secondary care (for example hospitals)
  • specialist services (for example ambulances).

Your information in your KMCR can only be seen by care professionals from organisations directly involved in providing care to patients and service users. Only those involved in your direct care will access information that identifies you.

Keeping your information

To keep your information safe, all health and care data in the KMCR is stored securely in a UK-based platform that has had stringent cyber-security assessments.

For full details about how your information is stored, who can access it and exactly what it will be used for, read our KMCR data and information governance document (PDF, 295.8 KB) .

You can also read our KMCR privacy notice for more details on data sharing and security.